ABSTRACT
HOWARD’S LENGTHY REFERENCE TO ALBERT SHAW MAY BE SIGNIFICANT because Shaw was an American and editor of the reformist journal The Review of Reviews, ‘who popularized the term ‘municipal socialism’. But Shaw was not a socialist in the accepted sense of the word, and for him the term was devoid of any true socialist connotation: he meant simply the expedient use of public funds to provide necessary public services for all citizens. At that time, in the USA as in the UK, a critical question was the best way of organizing such necessary public utility services such as gas, electricity, water and public transport. In the UK, they invariably came under municipal management until their nationalization (except for local transport) in 1947-48. In the USA, the formula varied —but some cities, notably San Francisco, actively espoused ‘municipal socialism’, as the San Francisco MUNI light rail system testifies to this day.
For Shaw’s numerous articles on the subject of municipal reform in Europe and America, see the extensive bibliography in Graybar (1974, pp. 206-220), and Shaw (1895a, b).
